1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for organizing files in an interactive, adaptive graph-based layout, and more specifically to systems and methods for organizing files in an interactive visual workspace using stacking and grouping based on similarity measures.
2. Background of the Invention
A basic type of interaction with photographs is to organize them into groups based on the relationships between photos. Working with large collections of images is part of a wide range of tasks that include selecting photos from on-line repositories, organizing personal and shared photo collections, and attaching metadata or tagging images in a digital library. Most interfaces for such tasks present some form of a list or grid of thumbnails, such as the image search results for Google® and Flickr® and the browsing interfaces for Picasa® and Microsoft® Windows Explorer. In addition to images, other documents can be organized in a similar fashion as long as they have thumbnail representations that allow users to distinguish them from each other.
However, existing organization systems limit the presentation of material to a grid-based display, which is too rigid to depict relationships properly. Additionally, when depicting files as nodes and connecting the nodes based on their relationships, it is often desired to pin certain nodes at certain locations to organize different classes of files. Unpinned nodes may have a short desired distance to more than one pinned node. If those pinned nodes are far apart, the unpinned photos will pile up along the straight line between the two pinmed nodes, inaccurately depicting the actual similarity to both nodes in an effort to depict the similarity to both nodes.
Finally, many systems for organizing and visualizing files do not permit a user to manually implement additional organization rules or override existing rules. A user is often stuck with the organization scheme configured by a software-based system.
Thus, it is desired to develop systems and methods for organizing files in a graph-based layout that provides greater flexibility and manual input by a user.